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i wouldn’t mind an omen or two

I thought, through the haze of knee and thighs and hips/flanks/bottom of lower back: since the age of thirteen, a female deity has been more instinctively correct. It may be habit but I think not only “God” but “Mother”.

Apparently, I have gotten, for my trouble, my mother breaking the head off my Kuan Yin figurine. Not on purpose, I should mention, but while she was cleaning, she jostled the speaker where the figurine stood and over she went. It’s a clean break, so she should be good as new before long, but that was hard. That was pretty hard. It didn’t help that I had to notice for myself, which, if I’m noticing things while fogged… well. Probably should have told me when it happened.

I can interpret it two ways:

1. So much for Merciful Mothers
-or-
2. I really do have an attachment to her if I’m that upset at the breakage.

I also thought: it is hard to separate the Christian message from the rest of the Bible. I’m still not convinced all of it is necessary. Absurd, to wield a red pen during one’s search for faith, or at least one’s consideration of a variety of faith. I don’t like the mean bits. I sound all of four when I say that. It’s still true. All this talk of enemies and smiting and lust in your heart and I just want to go cry because what is the point of unconditional love if all that is still important?

I can believe there was a resurrection. Can it be okay for me to follow the example of the resurrected, if not the letter of his law? I feel, on the one hand, this intense love for my fellow human, so intense that I weep and I rejoice at the same time. On the other, I am intensely afraid, not in the traditional sense of God-fearing but for what I may become if I am drawn into the mean bits. Or that I will be drawn into the mean bits.

Well, it was never going to be easy. Already people are drawing back from me just because I’m checking my attitude toward people whose Christianity is the closest to harmless that any belief gets. Is it so wrong of me to think “You don’t have to agree, but you needn’t willfully read these words for the worst”?

But there will be people who say “Your own reading comprehension is lacking” when it comes to the things I take away from the Bible.

But isn’t the point of not listening to a Pope the ability to decide for oneself what those words mean? We might as well have them in Latin from a man in a frock if not.

But it was never supposed to be easy, was it? Not for Jesus to pick his way through the morality of his own time and speak his mind; not for me to do the same?

So I drifted off to sleep begging for a sign and awoke as confused as ever. Or maybe that’s the sign.